Best-selling author and neuroscientist David Eagleman to visit Hunter College

The Arts Across the Curriculum initiative is pleased to announce that renowned neuroscientist and author David Eagleman will visit Hunter College during the Spring 2012 semester.

During a presentation slated for May 1 in the Lang Recital Hall, Eagleman will discuss with students, faculty, and staff his theories about human memory, time, and other themes from his best-selling books Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

Born in 1971 in New Mexico and now a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Eagleman has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times and on The Colbert Reportand NPR, among other media outlets. Both a noted scientist and an acclaimed author, Eagleman is known for his philosophical writings and teachings on the subject of human perception and the limitless nature of the universe. A self-described "Possibilian," he is also the unwitting leader of a kind of movement for the spiritually curious.

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion," Eagleman told The New York Times. "But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

Hunter College Theatre Professor Mark Bly has used Eagleman's Sum in his playwriting class, and he said the work speaks profoundly to the spirit of Arts Across the Curriculum.

"It is a work that proposes the ultimate philosophical, religious, creative, and scientific question: 'What if?'" said Bly, who is a member of the Arts Across the Curriculum Faculty Committee. "David invited me into his legendary Lab at Baylor ... I have seen him lecture, and his is a nimble, quick, far-reaching mind that his books Sum and Incognito reflect."